


Practical Science

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Banter, Clothing Porn, F/M, Fingering, Victorian scientific exhibitions, threats to mice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:47:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22280554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: “I think you’ve misunderstood the nature of the upgrade.” He looks down the length of her jacket, her shirt, her chest.“I understand it just fine.”“Still forget, though,don’t we? Maybe you’d like me to remind you.”
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 147





	Practical Science

“...this part of the entertainment met with occasional sibillations, and fortunately was finished before the hisses were general.”  
\-- _Times_ , on the Gallery of Practical Science, December 15, 1843

  


He evacuates the humans. He doesn't want them there. 

Most of them run screaming, much as he’d expected. Their fear is satisfying, but intimidation is only a diversion. And though the one with the Doctor gets off a shot, even that distraction dissipates with the steam as another, bigger and stronger, drags her out of the door. 

Then he’s alone in the empty hall with the Doctor. She’s still on her knees. She isn't likely to stay there. 

Before she has a chance to move, he hunkers down to her level. If he's read her right, she won't get up. This one likes to be equal. 

“Happy now?”

“You’ve still killed three people. Reverted to form, have we?”

He captures her forelock between his first and second fingers. “Oh my dear, you have no idea.”

It’s on his mind, but he doesn’t want to talk about it just now. He smooths the hair—so silky, so shiny, so ridiculous; he’ll have to come back to that—before moving on to her lapel. 

“I think you’ve misunderstood the nature of the upgrade.” He looks down the length of her jacket, her shirt, her chest. 

“I understand it just fine.”

“Still forget, though, _don’t we_? Maybe you’d like me to remind you.”

He can see it, how much she’d like to quip _no, thanks_ , and how much of a lie it would be. 

He taps a finger against one of her shirt buttons and rests it there. 

“Mother of pearl,” he says. “Are those meant to make up for the state of your calves?”

“You should try it.”

“I think I will.” But he doesn't mean that he’ll emulate her execrable fashion sense. 

He tugs on a bow tie end and then the loop and takes the thing apart to hang over the back of her neck. Still one-handed, he unfastens the button at her throat and the one below that. She’s very still and very tense. 

But with the third button, she starts away, twisting and scrambling to her feet at the same time. 

He lunges for her ankle; his open palm lands on bare shin. One shiver goes through them both, like a wave in a current. She turns back to look down at him. 

Here they are again. 

The Master snarls, unwilling to brook this arrangement. He pulls, hard, the leverage allowing him to unbalance her as he rises. They’re a muddle of bodies and motivations, his arm over hers. She’s trying to get away and stay at the same time. He stiffens his grasp to hold on to that proximity and distance, and in order to look into her eyes. He wants to hold her with his eyes—and he can, but only for so long before she hisses and looks askance, breaking away from the intimacy. 

“You can’t bear to look at me.” 

Recalcitrance, denial; if he didn’t know the Doctor so well, he wouldn’t have seen them warring on her face. He grabs her chin, but she backs out of it and into the orrery behind her. He follows, and by doing so, forces her to bend her shoulders over its wide curve. 

He leans in. He winds his fingers around the bars of the celestial sphere. Her mouth is so close, but he won’t kiss her, not when she doesn’t understand. He crowds her spine against the ledge of the bronze horizon, his thighs against hers. 

He wants her to understand. 

He’s the one to break away this time, swinging his head like a bull. He contemplates the model, paces around it to take the wheel that steers it. Little blue world, little complacent, wet planet in its protective cage. He would knock it out of its orbit if it would make a difference. The gears turn. The polished surface of the marble picks up the glassy light. Its satellites glide around it along their safe and predictable track.

The Doctor’s frowning at him, brow furrowed finely. “What's the matter with you?” she asks when he meets her eyes again. 

“Just thinking of home,” he says, loading the last word with portentous significance to mask the ache of its truth. He stalks past her and across the red runner and finds himself in front of a display with a mouse and a diving bell. 

He reaches in to pick the mouse out of its cage. It squirms in his hand, the difference in scale between them made stark by the small bones, the soft fur and delicate flesh, the rapid pulse. He urges the mouse into the miniature submersible and lowers it into the water. 

He peers at it through the window and fiddles with the valves. “I could pop it or I could suffocate it, what do you think?”

The Doctor’s horrified, disapprobatory expression is hilarious. The Master leers at her, still toying with the controls. So solid, so satisfying. He won’t kill the mouse, but he will make it uncomfortable before relenting. 

He divides his attention between the Doctor and his work, and maybe that’s his mistake. As he takes it to the edge, he goes a little too far, things go a little wrong, and he’s obliged to plunge his arm into the tank to wrench open the hatch and spill the creature into the water, scrabbling at it and it at him as he fishes it out to safety. 

He sets the sodden, stupid thing inside its cage. It huddles, shivering for a moment, and then recalls itself with a purposeful shake and starts to clean its fur. 

The Doctor laughs at him.

He upends the tank of water onto the Doctor, soaking the front of her tux and splashing her face. 

He takes advantage of her shock to make a lunge for her, their teeth just clicking, their mouths open. She isn’t going to understand anyway. She’s resistant and then she’s not, her hands going around the back of his neck, her fingers under the collar of his waistcoat. 

The thought escapes into being between them, surely unbidden.

_I missed you._

It’s turned under in the tumult just as quickly. 

The Master curls his hand over the back of the Doctor’s shoulder, feeling for the blade of her scapula under the jacket’s felt and canvas. Strange, her bones under his hand, fine like wee mousie’s. So this is what it feels like, her body suddenly slighter, trimmer, not actually more pliant against his—never more pliant against his—but implying that such a thing is possible. 

He'd like to tower over her, but as he pulls out of the kiss he hadn't meant to indulge, he acknowledges that at least he's finally looking her eye to eye. 

When she lets go, to make up for it, he shoves her in the chest, wet hand, wet shirt, the suddenness enough to send her stumbling. He follows, grabbing her elbow to spin her around, walking with her, promenading her across the hall. But she digs in before he finds a place to bend her over, pivots, her hand darting out. 

Shooting pain—she’s clenched his other arm—he’d been favouring it but, confident, he had forgotten there was a wound to protect, a vulnerability for her to exploit. The steam gun. In his focus on her and on their long-awaited confrontation, he’d ignored the injury altogether, pretending the pain into the background. 

Now, he shouts, doubling over. She’s still holding his upper arm, all her teeth showing, her fingers like insistent roots. 

“Winged you,” she says, triumphant and intimate. “As I thought.”

She feels around, probing and prodding. He closes his eyes, opens them again.

“Lots of bruising for sure. Maybe a little fracture. Must hurt.”

“Yes,” he hisses. 

She squeezes, hard. He lets his lips open but tightens his jaw against any more exclamations. 

This has gone on long enough. 

He sticks his hand in under her jacket at the waist, jerks her shirt and her undershirt up out of her trousers, and reaches over the cool skin, across her ribs, to her breast. 

Her expression changes. It’s not panic, but something pauses in her face, her eyes startled. 

“It’s one thing getting accustomed to a new type of body,” he narrates, pleased, “but quite another to be touched while in it.”

He fits his palm to her, applying only a little pressure. “When _you_ finally touched me...you remember I had to teach you. I’m going to teach you again.” He thumbs her nipple so that he can pinch it in the bend between that thumb and the flesh of his hand. Her whole body goes soft and stiff at the same time, sagging, making him tighten his grip. 

“Don’t fall.” He lets his voice go quieter than it’s been. “I can’t catch you.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

He grins. “Both.”

He presses up to her the telltale of dampness inside the fall fronts of his trousers, and soaked though she is, he’s sure she feels it, this sign of his eagerness, like they’re boys again. He wants to know whether she’s wet too, somewhere under the layers and the righteous anger. He thinks she is; it’s crackling at him, the itchy prickle of interest. She isn’t bothering to hide it. 

_Unfasten my buttons_ , he thinks at her. 

“Go on,” he says aloud when she hesitates. “I’ll show you.”

He grabs her hand with his mind as though she were a child. He calls it a win when she doesn’t wrench it away. She directs herself after that; she’s familiar with the construction of the fly, familiar with the anatomy, familiar with the things he’s enjoyed in every body, even if these two are still new to them—and one intervening, differently parametered lifetime on the Master’s part isn’t enough to have made the Doctor forget. 

The Master does regret the necessity of the male form. But there’s always next time, and he is at war, after all.

Still, it feels good, her hand on his cock. There's a lot of fun to be had in their current configuration. 

He lets her stroke him for a while, both of them adjusting their expectations to these hands, this skin. Fine-tuning the dials. Fitting again. Their hands inside one another’s clothes, their thoughts lap at one another’s thoughts, feelings and sensations only, wary on both their parts, pacing the ring of their minds. 

He lowers his hand to her waist and holds her, resting his hand for a moment on the narrowest part of her, his palm on her hipbone. He detaches her trousers from her braces. Then his fingers are beneath the waistband of her pants, and he's pulling everything down. 

He finds they're close enough now to a table for him to topple her over onto it, knocking her thighs apart with the back of his hand as she goes. 

The Doctor loses her grip on him. He doesn't care. He slips his fingers inside of her easily and he pumps, using his whole arm, wishing the other didn't ache so badly and bringing it into play anyway, pressing her palm to the table. 

But she pulls her hand out from under his and rests it on top instead, her touch gentle against his knuckles. 

He gasps or sobs or something; a sudden, unexpected, unstoppable exhalation. 

She looks stricken, and then she makes a decision and she closes her hand hard around his wrist, the sudden fire joining the white flame in his upper arm. 

He roars. 

The pain, the pain is good. The pain saves him and the pain spurs him, and now he flips her around again, and she lets him. He splits the tails of her coat at the centre vent, sweeping them aside along her thighs. He wants to see her arse. He wants to bury his face in that too-bright hair. He knows these desires to be contradictory, but he does them both anyway, and he puts his hand back inside of her, scout’s honour, and he can feel it, finally, an echo inside of him. 

When they're close to coming, he grabs the back of her neck. 

“Should I push your face into this machine?” he asks. “‘The Magneto’. What does it do, electric shock?” 

“It's harmless,” she grits out, though it snaps and pops at her in contradiction. He can hear her hearts in her chest, competing with his own, racing with the rhythm of his fingers. 

He smiles. He lets go of her head. 

And then the Master wraps his palm around the humming coil. 

The shock travels through them both, whether in reality or through concordance. It charges up his arm, to meet his wound; it’s hot and tight and sharp and it crashes into the other shock, the shock of the Doctor’s orgasm, her legs kicking, and his, spilling onto her skin. 

He holds on and holds on to the machine, all but overloading it, until all of it is over. When he finally lets go, he pushes away from both table and Doctor, blinking away dark afterimages. He’s breathing hard, and his chin is wet. 

The Doctor slips back onto her knees, her bottom against her boots and the bunched fabric of her trousers, which she eventually pulls past her hips. She looks up at him, staring, aghast, compassionate, and when she opens her mouth to speak, the Master knows he doesn't want to hear what she has to say. It won't be about the upgrade. 

“You should be thinking of home, too,” he interjects. “You should see—”

But he doesn't have a chance to finish. 

A door opens, and an arm appears, bowling a knobbed sphere into the room. The percussion of the flashbang isn't so destructive, but it's enough to drive him back, arm up to protect his eyes from the light and the smoke. He beats a retreat, staggering. 

“Wait!”

But another grenade rolls toward his feet, the aim too true for comfort. 

The last thing he sees through the haze of the explosion as he makes for another door is the Doctor getting to her feet, the shadow of concern still stark on her face.


End file.
